We live in the age of the conspiracy theorist . The wild ideas and the people who spread them have hit the mainstream. They’ve been yanked from the shadows of the internet, ripped from late-night AM radio call-in shows about alien abductions and Bigfoot sightings, and have now been put in positions of power and dictate public policy both at home and abroad. It’s a conspiracy theorists’ utopia—but how much of this horses—t do they actually believe?

That was the aim of a new study detailed by IFLScience and published in Royal Society Open Science , which found that the people who claim to believe conspiracies may not actually believe them at all.…